Headlight Anthology, n° 27

Alana Dunlop, Editor-in-Chief Gloriah Amondi, Managing Editor

In her essay “Uncanny the Singing that Comes from Certain Husks,” Joy Williams says that “the writer doesn’t want to disclose or instruct or advocate, he wants to transmute and disturb. He cherishes the mystery, he cares for it like a fugitive in his cabin, his cave. He doesn’t want to talk it into giving itself up.” Good writing strikes a careful balance between what is hidden and what is revealed. After selecting the brilliant pieces that make up Issue 27, the team was in agreement: these pieces keep secrets. They create small shrouds.

A shroud is both a noun and a verb, and so its meaning shifts depending on its context; fitting for a word that is concerned with concealment. In Issue 27, you will not find answers—you will find something better. Buried things. Competitive games of youth. Clandestine erotic fantasies. Barrages of questions. Barrages of horses. The complicated circumstances around Busby Berkeley’s birth. And many stars. This issue’s works splay themselves across the page, dancing with form and image, leaving the rest for you to figure out. Excellent writing makes you work, though that work is registered not as work at all, for it gives you enormous pleasure, doesn’t it?

One aspect of Issue 27 that shall not be shrouded is our passionate team, composed of student volunteers dedicated to amplifying exciting new voices in literature. To our totally stacked Masthead, to social media maven Taylor Ash, to wildly talented graphic designer Mack Gervais, and to fearless web designer Tehsin Ahmed—there is no lake deeper than our thanks. To the Concordia Council on Student Life (CCSL) and Concordia’s English Department—thank you for your generous contributions; you made this issue possible. Thank you also to Headlight’s storied EiC alumni Ennie Gloom and Misha Solomon—you lit the way for us. And thank you, reader, for picking up this issue, and thereby enshrining yourself in the glorious mystery.

notes from the editors

Morgan Gordon, Fiction Editor

Fiction often works like a kind of shroud: it veils and obscures, yet in doing so, it makes the world even more visible, pulling into focus what lies beneath. There is something in this process of cloaking that paradoxically illuminates; the veil, if chosen carefully, becomes a lens. The stories in Headlight’s 27th issue inhabit the space between concealing and revealing with remarkable care—from a Grindr connection, to a bottomless lake, to a misdelivered order, these stories invite us to peer beneath the shroud, confronting what resists being seen. I am deeply grateful to these three writers for the vulnerability and commitment they bring to their craft, and for their generosity throughout the editorial process. It has been an honour to step into the shroud with them.

Nicky Taylor, Poetry Editor

Poetry is about what is absent as much as it is about what is present. See the shroud as a symbol for poetry’s absent present: what is there and not. In Jordan Williamson’s “Schulanfang,” there is a spider “reclining in plantain lilies / confiding the secrets of the universe.” Theodore Heil’s “PARALLAX” hides a baby by some sleeping tulip bulbs. In Heitor Costa’s poem, horses disguise themselves as regret. Some of these poems keep secrets, while in others, a shroud is lifted. Suzanna Bakr reveals what really happened the night the Virgin Mary died. Lucy Pauker’s “Busby Berkeley Was Born in a Barn” makes peace with the strange absence behind the couch. Congratulations to all the poets published here. Thanks for trusting us.

Brooke Bastien, Creative Non-fiction Editor

Creative nonfiction should be an oxymoron but instead the real and the imagined become pressed so tightly together that the seam can no longer be located. “The Snotty Perverts” illustrates just that, as the obscene and the innocent collide not to resolve into clarity, but to produce something stranger, something laying in wait, ready to gobble you up.